It starts with business strategy and then flows into YOUR Story - are you on target?

Digital Media Storytelling (aka Social Media) -Use storytelling to pitch better, sell faster and win more business using the storytiser methodology

Your actual ‘Brand YOU’ story is something you might not realize you’re missing. When you first started your business, you probably had a long checklist. Things like: Build a website. Find more clients. Secure speaking gigs. Establish your expertise. And set yourself up on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and more.If you’re still struggling to describe what you do and who you serve, you’re probably overlooking some aspect of your story. When someone can see themselves in your story — the need to persuade, convince, or sell them disappears.

Everything depends on your story. If your story is not clear to you and to your clients, your business will not thrive. When your story gets aligned with your mojo (finding the magic in what you do), you’ll automatically start playing on a bigger platform. It leads to more sales, better speaking engagements, and a growing pipeline of opportunities.

Telling your Digtal story matters today more than ever. When people Google you, or visit your website – they go straight for the story. If you’re an entrepreneur – your perceived value is directly linked to that personal story. Especially when you’re an expert professional — blogger, author, speaker, coach, consultant, designer, etc. Getting paid what you’re really worth comes down to sharing how you see the world. Remember, people are you buying your ideas and opinions (i.e. your story of how things work).

Get a Coach
The most efficient way to move from dead brand walking to a powerful Brand YOU story is to get a coach who will help you succinctly refine your strategy and identify what story you have to tell. You'll learn to wrap facts up with emotions as stories (human beings are actually biologically hardwired to remember stories), share case studies as stories that people remember and how to tell a compelling story that your customers that compels action.

One that encompasses audio, visual and kinaesthetic positioning. We discuss the relevance of LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, the importance of the Social Website, Blogging, Podcasts and more. It's not about sharing what people 'had for breakfast' but a strategic groundswell of relevant stories you have to tell that fits your business purpose and goals.

The rise of corporate storytelling as a compelling USP tool

"It is my simple mission: to help everyone in our company understand the power of a single relationship and how to grow relationships to support our business. In almost every account we have ever lost, if we look back it is due to somewhere along the way we lost touch with the relationship."

These words were written by a social media coaching client of mine, Jane, She is a senior product manager with a major multi-national and her words resonate with the truth of experience both within internal corporate culture and with key customers. Jane is a warrior who loves to move into the trenches with her people and get up close and personal when helping them solve problems.

Jane is focused on the outcome she is seeking and builds relationships not because she is nice, kind, and compassionate. She actually is all of those things. She builds and nurtures relationships because she uses her brain. Jane is a pragmatic warrior who has been through countless battles with competitors, clients and upper management. Her philosophy of relationship building is based on what works. Her strategy will beat out more aggressive, brutish approaches over the long haul every time. But why does her strategy work?

She understands the value of networks, relationships and stories both in the online world and offline world. She knows that telling real human stories and embedding those with her stakeholders will win every time. And she is authentic, she uses story telling in a compelling real manner to boost the product she is responsible for into the mindset of her stakeholders. In short she allows them to participate in her story and that is what works. In this three part series we will explore the power of corporate story telling as a compelling tool and look at whose using it well.

But first let's look at the science of all of this, receent brain research suggests that the human brain is not so much a “thinking brain” but a relationship making brain. Dr. Gerald Huther, who leads the Dept. of Neurobiology at the Psychiatric Clinic of Gottingen, Germany, says “Until quite recently, it was held to be self-evident that human beings have a big brain to make it possible for them to think. However, the research results of the last years have made it clear that the structure and function of the human brain is especially optimized for building relationships. Our brain is thus much more a social organ than it is a thinking organ.”

Our brain has evolved over millions of years and our closest ancestors, the great apes, have much to teach us. Apes will fight and even kill members of other tribes who try to invade their territory. However, when scientists observe these animals in the wild they report that for the majority of time these animals spend much more time cooperating then fighting. Great apes have learned that building relationships increases the chance of success for all members of the community. By cooperating and specializing on essential tasks like food gathering, rearing the young and watching for dangerous invaders, they all benefit.

Jane is using her brain when she pays attention to building these interpersonal networks and she reminds her team that relationships take constant attention. She knows that especially in times of stress, building and strengthening relationships will win out over blame and arrogant behavior every time.

I'd like to give credit for much of this post,to a wonderful book which is well worth the read - The Elements of Persuasion Using Storytelling to Pitch Better. It's available on Amazon.

When was the last time you sat down with your troops and cascaded powerful stories of your USP related to your business into a warm human story? Have you integrated this into your business both offline and online, particularly social media?

The Origins of Six Degrees of Separation and the power of social media for business

Yesterday I spoke to a terrific group of people about developing a social media strategy and programme. The event was organised by that super networker Sean Grobbelaar. I spent quite a lot of time talking about innovation and the importance of connecting with tribes as you plan your social media campaign. The concept of tribes and finding super connectors is not new. We all feel closer together because of the power of the web and indeed more so than ever with the advent of new social media platforms that bring us together often with networks and friends that we may even have lost contact with at some point in our lives. So when we casually say 'gosh isn't the world a small place and it only takes six degrees of separation before I meet someone we mutually know' what does that really mean?

In the late 1960's well before the advent of the internet, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment to find an answer to what is know as the small world problem. The problem is this: how are we humans connected? Do we all belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world, are few and distant? Or, are we all bound up together in a grand interlocking web?

What Milgram was asking has a great deal of relevance to the success or failure of some social media programmes, that being how does an idea or trend or piece of news - travel through the population?

Milgram's idea to test this question was a chain letter. He got the names of 160 people who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and mailed each of them a packet. In the packet was a name of a stockbroker who lived in Sharon, Massachusetts. Each person was instructed to write his or her name on the packet and send it onto a friend or acquaintance who he or her thought would get the packet closer to the stockbroker. If you lived in Omaha and had a cousin outside of Boston, for example, you might send it to him, on the grounds that - even if your cousin did not himself know the stockbroker - he would be a lot more likely to be able to get to the stockbroker in two or three or fours steps.

The idea was when the packet finally arrived at the stockbroker's house, Milgram could look at the list of all those who hands it went through to get there and establish how closely connected someone chosen at random from one part of the country was to another person in another part of the country.

Milgram found that most of the letter's reached the stockbroker in five or six steps. This experiment is where we get the concept of six degrees of separation.

This phrase is so familiar to most of us today that we lose sight of how surprising Milgram's findings were. Most of us don't have particular broad and diverse groups of friends.

When Miilgram analyze his experiment to determine how did the packet get to Sharon in just five steps, the answer was not all degrees are equal. He found that many of the chains from Omaha to Sharon followed the same asymmetrical pattern. Twenty four letters reached the stockbroker at his home in Sharon, and of those sixteen were given to him by the same person, a clothing merchant Milgram calls Mr Jacobs. The balance of the letters came to the stockbroker at his office, and of those the majority came through two other men, whom Milgram calls Mr Brown and Mr Jones.

In all, half of the responses that came back to the stockbroker were delivered to him by these same three people.

Think about it. Dozens of people, chosen at random from a large Midwestern city, send out letters independently. Some go to college acquaintances. Some send their letters to relatives. Some send letters to old workmates and so on. Yet in the end when all those chains were completed, half of those letters ended up in the hands of Jacobs,Jones and Brown.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special people.

These people who we rely on heavily are 'connectors', people with a special gift for bringing the world together. We'll talk more about the traits of these special people in a later post, that too is a fascinating insight.

However I wanted to share the relevance of this experiment dating back to the 1960's and the rise today of the phenomena known as social media. Imagine if you could and can tap into these special connectors to communicate the benefits of your product or service with passion and with meaning for their lives. Who will they tell, I wonder...


This in itself is a strong argument for networking on linkeIN, facebook, twitter and so on. Have you observed these special people on social networking sites and met them in the real work perhaps? I'd be interested in your thoughts and observations. One person who comes to mind is Iggy Pintado. He has written an excellent book on what he calls the Connection Generation. He says 'Connection Generation reveals how individuals, groups and networks have progressed beyond their intent to communicate - but to a tangible connection between people, information, experiences and ideas. Due to the advent of internet and mobile technology, this dynamic transcends traditional thinking about societal generations. It proposes that anyone who had access to a computer or mobile device since 1995 - regardless of age - is part of the Connection Generation'. Personally I think what he is showing, albeit in a technology driven society, is how true Milgram's basic experiment was, that the power of social networks offers enormous opportunities to grow our businesses in ways many of us do not tap into.

Stay out of social networking and you may miss one of the greatest business opportunities you have to reach new customers and in some cases turn them into powerful evangelists for your product or service. Of course six degrees of separation also means the reverse is true, a lousy experience and your tribe may tell their friends and so on...

Focus on a great customer experience whatever social media platforms you use: service, customer satisfaction, innovation and brand essence, delivering on the promise remain paramount. A great social media example of doing it well is Zappos, the shoe company. You can read their case study for more information.

For further reading on Six Degrees of Separation, I highly recommend reading The International Bestseller - The Tipping Point, How Little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell.

Discovering your passion pulse in work and life

This week I coached one of my favourite clients. For the purpose of privacy let’s call her Claire. She operates a very successful SME with a focus on food but her life is overtaken by ‘To Do Lists’, deadlines, not enough sleep and living for tomorrow. So to try and get Claire out of all the detail that is consuming her life at present we went right back to basics. Identifying what her passion pulse was and, not surprisingly it was spending more time with family, not more work, that would ultimately just create more work rather than profit and freedom.Working with Claire I was able to share the story of Les Schirato from Australia’s No 1 pure coffee company Vittoria Coffee. Les is Managing Director of a hugely successful, privately owned family company, now in its third generation of family members. He joined the company as a young man and had a vision and passion for his product - coffee. To him it was special, like a precious gem. It was a luxury item and should not be just disregarded. Les' dream and determined passion was to bring to mainstream Australia espresso Italian style coffee. It was a big ask as Australia at that time was a nation of tea drinkers. Multiculturalism certainly wasn't in full swing.

When everyone doubted Les he simply put those doubts to better use and set about making coffee a category in supermarkets, by placing his precious brand in the big barrels’ of the fruit and veggie sections, not the shelves as no one would give him space.

Today Vittoria Coffee is an icon, an Australian success story and a super brand. When I first started working with Les in the late nineties he was on another mission, this time to teach people the difference between the Arabica Coffee Bean and the inferior Robusta Bean. Les was dismayed that some cafes and restaurants chose inferior products and he wanted consumers to know the difference. Often I would be with him at a cafe and he would walk behind the espresso machine and ‘show’ the barista how to make coffee using his product. My point is this: Les Schirato loves his product, his vision was huge and he could see along the way the roadmap of exactly what he wanted and had to achieve. He was determined that nothing would get in his way. Yes there were set backs, but that didn’t falter his passion and love of his product. He knew it was good and he was proud of it. It shows to anyone who meets him. Les surrounded himself with people who had a similar passion for his product although I would go so far as to say Les’ passion is and was contagious.

Just like Les Schirato’s story the same must be said of your product whatever it might be. Who said you had to be traditional with how you market your product. Dream big, much bigger than your industry or competition has ever dared to consider and find the single thing that could transform your business and possibly even give birth to a new industry. In Les’ case it was the birth of cafe culture in Australia. There are some that may say others contributed to this, true, but it was this man’s drive that eventually allowed others to benefit from his vision. So while you ponder what is your own passion pulse just observe next time you are at one of Australia’s finer dining establishments and take note of whose coffee is served, I bet you will be drinking Vittoria and it will probably be out of a ‘branded’ Vittoria Coffee cup, now that is vision!